 Thank you very much, as Adam pointed out earlier, the pun in the title, talking about esteemed deck, opened up all the valves, he's going to kill me later, I'm ready at half-knife. Okay, who here has heard of esteemed deck by show of hands? Right, so my talk is explicitly for that warm guy here, so I'll make eye contact and ask you about it afterwards. Okay, so what's my talk going to be about? I'm going to talk through your device, the setup, and how KD integrates with all of this. I'm going to talk about what we've been working on as contractors, and I'm going to give some big thoughts on what this means for KD and everyone, and then I'm going to leave a lot of time for questions because I like seeing Adam run around. So what is esteemed deck? It's a device here, and you can see this lady is using it to play video games, a games console are having it in traffic, this lady is playing a game while mindlessly wandering into traffic, I'm pretty clear I'm not an official Valve spokesperson, you can use it without wandering into traffic, but it's a games console. But what makes it interesting is it's a Linux console, it's a Linux device under it. So out in the box, what does it do? Well, it boots into this very, very, very, very minimal desktop, Linux desktop environment called Gamescope, and Gamescope has one job, which is show a single full screen window as fast as possible, and it is very, very, very good at that one job, it's rubbish at anything else, very narrow target. So it's good for showing a game on a games device, and nothing to mention about this device, is your root file system is read only, or immutable if you want to show off, and that means you can't install any other apps by default, you can't, but you also can't break it. It's very easy, hackable, you can turn it off, but it's designed as a consumer device. So why am I talking about this at a KDE conference? Because of the next slide. Use your deck as a PC because it is warm, and what Valve are providing at very minimal environment isn't enough to use it as a PC, to access a PC, so it's supporting multiple monitors and doing all this setup involved in that, drag windows about, sort of printer drivers which are a pain, all of these complicated things you can't build very quickly, it's the sort of thing that takes 22 years to build, which is what we've been doing. So it took a very smart decision, stick KDE on your device, and that was Valve's vision. You put your deck, you can use it as a PC, and that saves you buying another device, buying another PC, and you're hooked into your warm device, it does many more things, and hooks you into that warm market store, which is where they came from it. And that's our opportunity to shine, it's where we come into our own element because they want a desktop, that's what we provide. So how does KDE on your device work? Hidden away in the power menu, press a button called switch to desktop, as highlighted by the yellow arrow instead of the red label, and you get a full desktop experience. If you want to know what plasma looks like on a steam deck, just open your own laptop because it's the same but slightly smaller. And out of the box, you're not just shipping plasma, you're also shipping a handful of KDE applications, Dolphin, Arc, Gwendu, but not that many. But we have discovered, and even though some of the root file system is read-only, you can still add the flat packs applications into your own home directory. So discovered available in desktop mode, and any app available on FlatHub can be easily downloaded and installed. And quite an interesting twist on this, is once the application is downloaded and installed, you can then load them from that very fast single-user Damescope mode. So you can grab the app there and still not have to go to the desktop when you want to use that one app. You've got your desktop mode when you need something very powerful. So we talked about how you can plug it in and use it as a PC, but it's also a portable device, and you can use it as a portable device. You can run plasma without plugging in an external monitor and a mouse and a keyboard. So you can see it here, I'll just go to a more overhead screenshot so you can see what it looks like. And we're trying to provide that full desktop experience. It's that menu looks the same, Dolphin, it's a window you can drag it around and you can interact exactly as you would. And it's quite an interesting device, it's very unique compared to any other device I've seen before because, working from plasma, because you have a touch screen, so mouse input is sorted, but you have a trackpad, so mouse input is sorted. It's another trackpad, so mouse input is sorted, and you've got a joystick which you can use to control your mouse. So mouse input is sorted, it's also an accelerometer in here, and many people on the internet see social media people said, we can hook this up to control your mouse. So, pretty well covered from mice, but keyboard is still lacking. So we do have a virtual keyboard option, and you press a key combination, it invokes. So it's an interesting device because it's not something you see in many other situations of that many mice, no keyboard. So how are people using a deck? A steam deck has been shipping for a couple of months now, and we've seen it used in ways maybe not as expected. So we're seeing people booth into the desktop mode to configure that gaming mode, a go in, install some emulators, which is a small enough task that you can do with just the mouse and the virtual keyboard, and do your mods so you can customise your boot splash, you can modify a few files, and doing mods and customisation, and then you're using your file manager as a way of tweaking. Another thing we saw was people using a desktop mode to fulfil missing functionality of the gamescope mode, because on day zero of launch there are things missing, it was complicated wi-fi, when Valve were making at UI, it didn't come out as some radius server where you need to download a file in advance and ship it in a swell older. But the support forums had an easy answer to the Twitter desktop mode, did all of this, and it's all network manager on this stack, it's all shared, and then you can go back. So it was being used as a crux. People with Bluetooth headphones, you need to select a white codex that's not quite as good, Valve don't necessarily need it in their UI, it keeps it nice and simple, but there's an option. So we're fulfilling that gap of just filling in these niche requirements, arguably you could call it missing functionality, but we're able to sort of drill down into the details, but also bigger features, like if you want to record your screen while you're sharing a game and streaming, because that's what people are doing nowadays, or if you're taking your screenshots and you want to copy it to an SD card or upload it to a cloud, you can't really do that in the gaming mode, but you've got a full desktop experience with you already, you don't have to go home and plug it in. And then things get even more creative. So I've taken some photos from social media, and this guy is plugging in some GNU radio, I never understand GNU radio, but it's got cool plots, and they're always across them, and he's probably doing something illegal, but people going on social media saying, well I've got my deck, it's easy to use as a PC, but it's not as big and bulky as a laptop, but more flexible to use than a phone. I don't think you struggle to do this sort of thing on a phone about a lot of work, maybe on a plasma mobile, but even there you don't have as many mice. So it's really coming into its own form factor in ways that we weren't seeing. And in this guy, a genuine post from social media a couple of days ago, I went to a conference but forgot my laptop, so I'm using my Steam Deck, and he's had it with him, probably playing games when he should have been concentrating, but then opened up a text editor, word processor, and they made it work. And I'm using my Steam Deck to present, so that's what I win in your face guy on Reddit, but we're seeing it using these sort of creative ways. But we're also seeing people using it properly, as expected. Again, going to social media posts, anyone else using your deck is a desktop, and if you look for your comments, there's enough people saying, yeah, it works, great. And one thing I think I found interesting is we've had Katie on laptops and such in the past, but in a laptop there's an expectation, I think we see, or if you've got a laptop, it must behave identical to Windows if you're a new user or it's rubbish, and people have that expectation. But when things are slightly different, even when you're plugging in a mouse and keyboard, because they weren't really expecting a desktop when they set out to buy it, it doesn't value on. They're happy with it, they're happy to experiment that little bit more and go, oh, maybe different, but I like it, it's different. I'm pleased with that. So this was a quote from our contact at Valve. Desktop mode has been used a lot more than we expected. I'm going to skip ahead. And this is all done to the hard work of Edwoman Crady. I need you to all be proud. You've wasted your flap. Don't do it again. That's enough because this talk is all about me and my team and what we've been working on. So that's a device. But how did we get there? So blue systems were contacted by Valve. We got in touch. We knew they wanted to do something with Plasma. And we also got some assistance from Enioka later on in this journey. To work on very specific areas of Plasma, places where Valve has said, I think we can do this a little bit better. Because that's heterogative, that's what they should have as users. I mean, they're users, they're shipping to clients. So when they contacted us, we didn't know about the Steam Deck. We weren't hired for that. It was a secret. I assume they knew. I don't know if they knew. But they gave some work saying, we're going to do something with Plasma. So we started off and mostly didn't do many Steam Deck-specific tasks. Partly because they had this vision of using it as a desktop. But that didn't matter because Valve cared about building an ecosystem regardless. That was a phrase they constantly repeat, build an ecosystem. Because it's in their interests for Linux to get better. On Linux, they are the store where you get games. And they are a place where, if you want to sell a game, Valve are providing an added value, which you don't get in many other stores. So it makes sense as a good partnership. So to get away from those other stores that Alice was talking about on Windows and Android and other things. Rather than competing, it's in their interests for a new market to fight. Which means Plasma and Noam and everyone getting as more users. So they really care about that. So we did get some in-kings about Steam Deck. Because occasionally they would say, oh, there's a touch-in for it in this application. And we'd say, oh, is that something you want us to look into? And then it'd scurry away and say no. So, but obviously at some point we knew. So what have we been doing for Valve? One of the earlier tasks was improving resource management, resource visualisation. So it's a network graph in case this guard got added first. And we end up building a whole new monitor with GPU information and new GPU memory use and GPU. Because that's what games are more interested in. And we added a new system monitor with desktop widgets that's been talked about in a previous academy. And all of these bullet points you could do half an hour talks on. I won't because of the Internet schedule. Another big part, system settings. And this is a work from Enioka. And if you have any questions, please go to Kevin. I'm sure he'll be really pleased to hear about him. Highlight change settings. System settings is always a very difficult topic. You open it up and it's just... Settings everywhere and you've changed something. Something stops working. You don't know what is changed. How do you go about it? How do you easily go about and fix that? And you've probably all seen in Plasma two releases ago. We is a button added in system settings. You press it and then you can see which settings have you changed from the default and the default provided by a look and feel and the default provided by a system. There are always different layers that happen. And with that, we also found that revert to default button as in every KTM. It didn't work in so many cases because it's the sort of thing where a developer writes once and goes, that works. And then somebody comes along and goes, I'm going to add a new config option. But do they think about testing at button? Not really. So you get this feature created if that happens. So going through every module and not just fixing it up but creating an infrastructure that does it automatically and it's amazing. A more left field thing thrown from them is they wanted a firewall because they knew you'd have people coming in from windows and that's the expectation. It should be a firewall. It should be a way to configure it. And they funded that, they shipped that. And one thing that we've seen is VALF would suggest something and I'd be skeptical but I'm a good contractor so I don't know. And then the social media would come up and everyone would, when you do a release note to Plasma, people would say, oh, that's a really good idea. I'm really good at that. So you do tend to have that finger on the pulse of what's actually needed. And we also added this landing page, system settings. You want to find one of the few things that are going to change a lot, like theme, dark theme, that sort of thing. So on the front page, click it, move on. Another massive topic, power profiles. Steam decks on battery life, but also laptops on battery. These sort of things matter and there's a lot of advances happening in the kernel space and we weren't really utilising a desktop space and some work was happening in this free desktop world but it wasn't really ready for production, it wasn't really ready for us to use for our needs and we still needed to integrate into the EU. So we've added support for power profile switching. If your kernel supports it, you'll see it in the battery monitor. You can say you want performance profile or battery saving, which I hope my Steam decks on right now. So I don't lose halfway through your size and we did a lot of work upstream in all of that as well. Another big aspect with power and resource management is putting all the applications into different C-groups which again I talked about at a previous academy but now we know it is well funded. I'm making out applications, foreground applications run a bit faster. But it wasn't just in Plasma. There's a few cases where generally the community does a great job of all the applications and there's some applications which are essential and some which are more fringe use cases. And we had the job of going over a couple of these core applications and just giving them a quick cleanup. Gwynview was amazing over time. I think there had been a drop in commit and new behavioural changes had come in as standards. So it just needed that little bit of cleanup and that's what we've discussed of. Let's give it a shouldn't have used the word overhaul. We don't know who is just visual refresh of let's go a certain amount of time, how much we can polish and sort out. And another thing in related to Gwynview, if file management wasn't quite there with Keo, it blocks a lot, particularly if you put a slow SD card in. Maybe now, I think it might have been thinking about a steam deck when this request came in or if you put a slow SD card, it blocks a lot. Now it doesn't, now it's super fast. And then I want on review right now, spectacle is a good application, functionality will work, but we can make it a bit more streamlined. Expectation has changed. What we've seen in other desktops have become this more integrated smooth process. It's about out of workflow. And we're like, well, we should have that. We can make sure our apps are up to date. And that's on review right now. So check it out. And hopefully we'll see outlanding. But Valhav weren't just thinking about end user-only device. They're also thinking about developer experience because if you're trying to profile your game on a steam deck, you're going to be logging in. You're going to be running console. They probably know all of the commands. They're not in the same cases Thomas was talking about earlier, but it's still, it's reflowing and most lineship alternatives is just enough off that if you're not used to your Linux world, which some of these developers are not. It's some stuff that could be polished up. So they funded some console work. And what I think they were focusing on was the things that bothered them because they could relate to that. And what have we done in Plasma? We continued all our startup improvements. Startup is much, much faster than it was years ago. Is that system D managed boots which has helped make things so much more robust, particularly with other upstream changes that happened because robustness is something I really care about. And microphone volume indicated. It's a very small thing compared to all of these other bullet points that are worthy of our own talks. But the back door of how this came about is good. We were in a meeting and somebody who will remain nameless didn't have a microphone set up properly and it was embarrassing. But it was a realisation of it's not your fault, whoever it may be. Let's fix this, let's put it in some time and fix a sort of tiny paper cut. So that was something that came up from there. And we funded some of your work on QFuse when we thought it was going to stall. We took on that G-Soc guy and let him finish off. So I mentioned the only way to install applications is flat packs. And flat packs is great but it's slightly more than just packaging your app. Packaging your app gets it on the store but there are some nuances that don't quite work exactly the same as a native application. And they need to be taken care of. And it's not just the inside application where things are missing out of a fundamental layer as well. So we sorted out the portal support for drag and drop outside a file system. So a flat pack might have a different knowledge of a file system compared to your space outside a flat pack. So if you pass in a path that doesn't necessarily match up. So we hooked all of that up with some portal magic. I think we were some of the first to actually make out work everywhere. And we had a KD API for process spoiling outside the sandbox because flat pack hide views have been. So if you are Cate and you have plugins and try and execute a Git command it does nothing. And that was something I cared about. If we're in a position where a Cate developer says we're not comfortable with our product on a flat pack because it makes our product look bad that's a problem it needs fixing. And we need to take a step back and not just say, oh Cate it's your problem. We need to look at underlying problems and fix all of that. And we did. And well, hopefully. If people do have issues please do let us know. So we had a KD API and K-core add-ons and we did a work porting Cate to that. We didn't want to push anyone. We sort of said we've done your work if you're comfortable with this being on the store. Let's put it on the store. And elsewhere moving forwards now. And that's going to be good because it's something I miss on the deck. You want that good text editor even if you are using a virtual keyboard. And the portal is a moving target. The way a flat pack works is it's a packaging level system but it's also a firewall protection system. It's trying to lock down and sandbox your application. And the more you sandbox the more you need to poke holes in that sandbox to make things continue to work. And that's the way a portal comes in and that's just constantly iterating target. Silence befells a room, silence befells my entire slides while I have a drink. So there's a lot to do away then. And so much so I know we have two talks tomorrow. I'm not going to drill down on into what we've been doing but let me just say it's a big topic. And the issues go beyond KD. It's not a case of... Issues go beyond KD. It's not just a case of us fixing a few things. It's... What's going on here? Okay. It's not just a case of us fixing... It's just infrastructure throughout this stack. It's all of the clients and there's protocol missing. And I mean, Wayland works really well if you have a very simple app. It is a window. It's all isolated, self-contained and behaves the way a simple app works. But as soon as you have a virtual keyboard or a driver trying to replay events or absolute positioning like a friend overlay where all your... See all your contacts that Valve has or if you want to stream all your media to another device which is a feature Valve has. And there's so many cases where Valve's own software wasn't really working with Wayland. So they know X isn't the future. But Wayland still has gaps at midfilling. And it's a massive long-term effort. And they've been funding that. But it also means they're interested in KDE for your long haul as well because they know it's a big project. And we've done even more behind-the-scenes that I didn't bother writing into bullet points because there's so many lots of little tiny things everywhere. So some closing thoughts wrapping it up. A big topic. Why did Valve choose KDE? And how am I going to think about that? And I'll tell you my opinion, which is right because I've got a microphone. They chose it because they use it themselves and they like it. It's a very simple concept. They use it and they like it. But there's also so much to read into that. You're not targeting some hypothetical user. And I think that's something it's easy to get into my insight of oh, what if a user does this? What if a user does that? And I think it's very clear from all your conversations they focus on what they like. And they took out a story of, well, my opinion probably reflects a lot of people. I'm not that weird. And they focus on that. And it's also quite interesting that Valve didn't say, see this product and go, what can we shape it into? They were like, we're happy with this. This is what we want. And I think there's also a tendency to look at some other products that are happening in going, oh, we need to pivot into this space. We need to pivot into that space. And sometimes we need to look inside and go, actually, what's working well? And in many ways, Plasma right now and the KDE staff and all the applications is actually working well. And we should lean into that. So it's an exciting time. I think it's safe to say it's as Plasma's biggest adoption onto mainstream hardware as ships out the box. I mean, I know it's had other products in the past. I like most about this is a lot of the times we see people using Linux because they're targeting for cheap. And when they use Linux because they're targeting for cheap, that shows in all of aspects of what goes to market. But that's not a taste of Valve. They're not using Plasma because it's cheap. They're using it because they can control the store. And therefore, we're happy to put it on a high-end device. We're using it because they like it. So, this is Valve. I'm not sure if you'd asked me a couple of years ago would I be on stage talking about Valve funding a device running Plasma as being shipped to a loss of people. I wouldn't. I'd laugh at you. And I would have been wrong. So who's next? Is it going to be Dell? Is it going to be HP? Ali said you're not going to see Plasma on helicopters. Or three years from now, if I'm floating on the stage, you'll look like an idiot. And I'm going to look really cool. Is there going to be something else on you? Like a car, mental. So, we'll see. And if we can prove ourselves in the marketplace with one big vendor, hopefully others will notice. And where we're at now with Plasma on a deck isn't where Plasma's going to continue being on a deck. We're continuing to iterate on it. The community's continuing to iterate on Plasma upstream. We're changing this. We're going to make some awesome software that's being exposed to lots of awesome people. And next year, maybe we'll be in a position to stand on a hill with a flag that's been successful. Once a rat, maybe. So, any questions? Also, how long have I got up? We have about 10 minutes left. Oh, perfect. So, I'll be doing questions from the audience and online as well. I'll start with the online ones and then I'll go back and forth. So, the first one from Nicholas. Who do I need to bribe or convince to pre-install KD Connect on the Steam Deck? We'll see what happens. In terms of default packages, that's something outside our control. It's something because we can make recommendations, we've got a good partnership. We'll see what happens. I would also suggest you check out the beta options in the Steam Deck and see what you see in main instead of release. You said that the Steam Deck has been sold to, or sold or distributed to many, many people. Do we know how many? I do. I don't know if it's public. Can you ask if they can tell us? Oh, I do know. Okay. Okay, good. Okay, I can tell you that. They have crossed over a million and they're still processing the backorders. And once they're done with the backorders, we're not still going on. So, once they've processed the backorders, then they expect another surge of sales because then it's going to be available in store. And that's going to be a huge boost. We're also seeing a dock, which is not this one, a dock being announced, oh, screen flicker for this. It also announced a dock, sorry. It also announced a dock that's coming soon, and I think it's really going to boost the plasma on the deck usage because then it's a bit easier to plug it into a mouse keyboard. We don't need a mouse. We don't need a keyboard and monitor and Valve are using unofficial docs, so it works a little bit better. Next question comes from Andreas. Valve seems somewhat slow with updating plasma on the deck, even in the beta channels. Do you have any insight in the reasons for that? Say it again, sorry. The plasma is old on the Steam Deck when update. What happened? It's not, so when they have the operating system and talk about how it's immutable, they've got big updates that they take atomically. And that's a big process. After our first deck, our first shipment, they were like, we've got this, let's play safe. And then let's work where we're going afterwards. So I think it's just playing safe for now. We will see updates. We will see updates where it is stacked. The deck itself works well for games, and it works well if you connect it to a TV and a keyboard and a mouse. But if you try to use it as a desktop version, on the deck itself, it's raised up. It doesn't really work very well because the mouse is only on the right side, because I'm left-handed. OK, so I can do a live demo. I'm not going to do a live demo because I'm not an idiot. But if you go to Steam settings, you'll see how much control you've got because one thing Valve do is settings. So on this window here, which... I'll ask you what someone's saying about your mouse. If we can find... Oh, OK. There is a setting. I will show you and you can configure every aspect of it. You can either switch it to touch bad. You can change the sensitivity. It's got an intense amount of control. And that's all being done at a Valve layer. So you probably look at system settings. Arguably, that's not a streamline as it could be, but it's Valve providing that translation from all of these buttons to mouse keyboard events. And therefore, it's hooked into their UI. So once you find it, it's the same as you want to use to configure it on games. And it's very, very powerful. There's some community templates on there as well. OK, thanks. OK, another question from the online audience. How does one backup data from the Steam Deck did Valve ask for a nice backup and restore UI on their device? There's not something they've asked for. But you have a fire manager. So I think that's as much a case of you can use a deck in desktop mode as a way to do something. You might need to find that wiki page on GitHub where someone says, these are where all your files are. And you can also use other apps on top. There are existing backup restore applications. Grab one from Flatpak. It will probably work because you get your director synced up. So I think it's an interesting question. It could be an interesting avenue. I talked about how plasmas and what we're doing is not fixed. We're going to continue iterating over time. So who knows what your future brings. I've been helicopterist. Valve used the desktop edition. There was an option to use plasma mobile edition for the UI. Which would be a better option but there would be something needed extra on top. So was there any talk about this where there was a choice? So we certainly made them aware of what we had in Plasmas Mobile because we were at Plasmas Mobile. I knew some of the people were aware when it kicked off a lot of the Plasmas Mobile stuff. So we were aware, we certainly saw things of suggestion. But I think it's also, it's not a mobile device because, I mean we've run it locally but I find a touchpad very difficult to use because unless you have very long fingers, it's unique. So I think it was very important to them to sell it and market it as a desktop mode because if you want that full-window experience, that's what your mode day provides for. So I think it's about reducing that overlap and provide something new which is why it didn't go through that. But there are plasma mobile applications that all translate. So we've got to discover out your box. It's a relatively small screen. Your convergence is convergence. It doesn't matter if it's a small screen, a big screen or somewhere slightly in the middle, it's sort of just works. And we are seeing that work from Plasmas Mobile really come into play there. So I think there's a lot of scope for applications to shine there and be something up their queue to say, oh, install this app, happen to come from Plasmas Mobile to their Mrs standalone app, doesn't really matter and have that available. What were the motivations for Valve using its own immutability solution? I don't know outside of a stack because, I mean, we focus on Plasmas Mobile because that's our level. I think you're right that other things exist now. It's a whole structure similar issue for door of silver, blue, that sort of thing. But they also need to retain, it would have started this years ago, what existed at the time when they did it, that's up to them. So I'm afraid I can't answer. Can you go back to the slide with the deck? I'll close Libraffis, but yeah, sure. Ruining my life. I don't really have any question. I just want to take the picture and I miss the chance. Oh, I see. Do you want me to stand? I'm going to stand under it. I mean, you could also look at, take a photo of this and just zoom in a bit closer. I mean, I have to say, not my... So not even that long ago, KDE still had the reputation of being a heavyweight resource hog. And I mean, it has gone down with Plasma 5, but has the fact that we are running Plasma 5 on a device that has to be extremely efficient, improved that, has there been like specific feedback coming that, oh, wow, this is now actually fast? So I don't think... Well, there's a few things to drill into there. Firstly, this is as powerful as my laptop, certainly in terms of how quickly it can compile when. It's actually a bit smaller, but it lasts quite a long time. And I don't think we've hit... We certainly haven't hit any issues and we've never been that worried about any issues. But as to whether your perception has changed, I don't know, I don't think... It's not something I saw a lot of concern about because they're marketing it as a desktop, you can use it at the PC. I don't think people are worried about thinking of it as an embedded device. But hopefully we've improved, we've fixed a couple of people's minds on the internet. That's all the time we had for questions. Thank you very much, David.